Sista Brunch

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the fourteenth of fifteen conversations from that day. Actor, writer, and producer Lanett Tachel sits down with actor and producer Hari Williams for her first Sista Brunch. Lanett describes the moment she felt most seen: Angie's...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the thirteenth of fifteen conversations from that day. Director Jade-Jenise Dixon — who also appears in Volume 4 of this series — sits down with actor, writer, and producer Lanre Idewu. They've been crossing paths since the wrap...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the twelfth of fifteen conversations from that day. Filmmaker Rraine Hanson — born in Kingston, based in LA, working across the union art department as set dresser, prop master, and production designer while making his own work...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eleventh of fifteen conversations from that day. Our drop-in co-host Shawn Pipkin-West — a director and UPM who was a Sista Brunch guest twice before joining us behind the mic — sits down with her friend Janean Jeffries, an...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the tenth of fifteen conversations from that day. Charisma Justice and Michelle Turner joined us through our talent producer Kamesha Rodriguez, and gave us one of the most candid conversations of the day. Asked when she last fel...

This is our first collaboration episode. We teamed up with Consider This for Comfort, the award-winning podcast hosted by Eteng Ettah, to welcome back Hillman ahead of A Different World's premiere on Netflix on Thursday, September 24. In the first half, Eteng and Fanshen talk about what the original series meant to them and to a generation of Black viewers. They get into the case for a sequel in a...

Fanshen Cox and guest co-host Christabel Nsiah-Buadi welcome writer, director, and producer Felicia Pride to Sista Brunch for the first remote-recorded episode during COVID-19. Pride traces her path from marketing and posting poetry online to freelance journalism, grad school, book publishing, and authoring six books, including The Message, before a seven-year pause from writing while running a ma...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the ninth of fifteen conversations from that day. Four-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning bilingual producer Geraldine Porras sits down with Liz Franco, Manager of Original Documentary Series at Netflix. Geraldine shares what i...

Hanelle Culpepper is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for "Exodus," the season two finale of Paradise on Hulu. She is the second Black woman ever nominated in that category. So we are bringing back our 2020 conversation with her, with a new introduction from Fanshen recorded ahead of the ceremony. In this episode, Hanelle tells Fanshen Cox and Anya Adams how she be...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eighth of fifteen conversations from that day. Award-winning filmmaker Tamika Lamison sits down with Kai Bowe, Director of Current Programming, Unscripted at the Oprah Winfrey Network. Tamika's message to the next generation...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the seventh of fifteen conversations from that day. Diana Williams — CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, previously Creative Development and Franchise Producer for Star Wars at Lucasfilm — sits down with Liz Fran...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the sixth of fifteen conversations from that day. LMU film student Kalle White sits down with Daria Strachan, a Black Girls Film Camp alum we first met at Essence Festival 2024. Kalle talks about how a year of injuries reshaped...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the fifth of fifteen conversations from that day. Poet, author, speaker, and actor Arielle Estoria — author of The Unfolding — sits down with writer, engineer, and Made For More Entertainment founder Daniel K. Hunter. The card a...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the fourth of fifteen conversations from that day. Screenwriter, script consultant, and founder of The Professional Pen Shannan Johnson sits down with director Jade-Jenise Dixon (Truth Hall), newly elected co-chair of the DGA Wo...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the third of fifteen conversations from that day. Actor and writer Candace Nicholas-Lippman — whose one-woman show A Rose Called Candace was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon's JuVee Productions — sits down with writer C...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited our community to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the second of fifteen conversations from that day. Line producer and Hudson Philmore founder Maegan Philmore (Season 4) sits down with writer-director E'lon Joi, founder of Black Film Allegiance (Season 1). The card asked: when did you fee...

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited our community to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the first of fifteen conversations from that day. USC film and television production freshman Addison Belhomme — who launched her own production company at 13 and directed two short films with First Lady Michelle Obama at 15 — trades quest...

Pull up a chair. This is Sista Brunch. Sista Brunch is a weekly podcast sharing the stories of Black women and Black gender-expansive people thriving in film, TV, and media. Hosted by Fanshen Cox (she/they), co-author of the Inclusion Rider, the show is seven seasons and 140+ episodes deep — and still growing. Every week, our guests pull back the curtain. How they broke in. What their projects rea...

Four years running, the most-watched films on streaming have been led by Women of Color. So why is Hollywood still treating diverse stories as a risk? On this bonus episode of Sista Brunch, we sit down with Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón and Jade Abston, two of the researchers behind UCLA's Hollywood Diversity Report, to break down what the 2026 data actually shows about who gets to lead, direct, write,...

Show Notes How does an "army brat" with no Hollywood connections become an Emmy-winning documentarian whose work sits at the center of one of the most urgent conversations in America? In this bonus brunch, filmmaker Luchina Fisher pulls up a chair to talk about the long, unexpected road from journalism to the director's chair—and the craft, ethics, and relationships that carry a story from the pag...

What's Greeking? What's a Frankenbite? What does it mean to "package" a project? And why does a Hollywood producer call a sewing machine her most important piece of technology? In this Sista Brunch Season 7 bonus episode, every guest shares the tool, term, or technology from their craft that an outsider would never understand. From set dressing to composing, from location management to unscripted...

While working as one of Sista Brunch's season seven associate producers, Charlie T. Savage was quietly making a feature film. Voices the Musical is a 1967 period piece with nine original songs, shot in nine days in Inglewood, now nominated for Best US Narrative Feature and Best Screenplay at the 30th Annual ABFF. In this bonus episode, Charlie shares the full journey -- co-writing the script in on...

Effie T. Brown is an award-winning producer, CEO of Game Changer Films, and a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her producing credits include Real Women Have Curves and Dear White People, and she made history when she challenged the lack of diversity on HBO's Project Greenlight -- a moment that helped spark the creation of the Inclusion Rider. In this season seven finale...

Diana Williams is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment, a multi-platform venture studio building franchise IP across film, TV, video games, and immersive experiences. She is the former Creative Development and Franchise Producer for Star Wars at Lucasfilm, where she co-founded ILM Immersive -- the lab behind Vader Immortal and the Academy Award-winning Carne y Arena. In this conv...

Ashlee Hypolite is the Executive Director of Hollywood CPR, the nonprofit workforce development program that provides free, union-track training for below-the-line careers in film, TV, and live events. In this conversation, Ashlee shares her journey from Trinidadian roots in Boston to Brandeis to CAA to leading one of the most impactful pipeline programs in the industry. She breaks down how Hollyw...